Tag Archives: Wydawnictwo M

This is not the time to hide in the catacombs.

An interview with the Polish news service, FRONDA, www.fronda.pl, January 16, 2010

1. You had some trouble getting your books published. What is the general reaction to them in the secularized West. Are Catholics the only people who read your books?

O’Brien: I receive many letters from believers and non-believers, telling me how much my books have meant to them. It is always a deep consolation, because for many years I could not get my books published in Canada, my homeland. My country is extremely secular, socio-politically similar to Germany and Holland. I wrote manuscripts from 1977 until 1995, and always the publishers told me they would publish my books if I deleted the Catholicism, or warped it. I always refused, and thus remained unpublished in my own native land. Even now, none of my novels have been published in Canada. When in 1995 I finally sent my manuscripts to a publisher in the USA, they were immediately accepted. Since then, during the past 15 years more than 12 of my books have been published. It was a good lesson for me about many things. For one, the true nature of secular culture, which is always tending toward the neo-totalitarian suppression of cultural freedom (as well as political freedoms); it is ever willing to lock Catholic culture into a ghetto. As Orwell once wrote: “Some of us are more equal than others.”